On the Cutting Edge

Strong Undergraduate Geoscience Teaching

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Exemplary Teaching Activities

Beginning in 2011, On the Cutting Edge began a process to review the extensive collection of activities submitted by workshop participants and members of the geoscience community. The Review Processes page illuminates the details of the peer review process, and the activities are scored on 5 elements: scientific veracity; alignment of goals, activity, and assessment; pedagogical effectiveness; robustness; and completeness of the ActivitySheet. The activities that score very highly in these areas become part of the Cutting Edge Exemplary Collection and are featured below. To date, activities in the mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry, environmental geology, structural geology, geophysics, and tectonics areas have been reviewed so the exemplary collection is composed of activities from these topics. As the review of additional areas is completed, exemplary activities from the rest of the collection will be included here.

Investigating Earthquakes: GIS Mapping and Analysis (College Level)part of Starting Point-Teaching Entry Level Geoscience:Teaching with GIS:ExamplesBrian Welch This is a college-level adaptation of a chapter from the Earth Exploration Toolbook. The students download global quake data over a time range and use GIS to interpret the tectonic context. -

Geologic Puzzles: Morrison Formationpart of Starting Point-Teaching Entry Level Geoscience:Interactive Lectures:ExamplesHeather Macdonald, College of William and Mary Images of faulted strata, tilted turbidites, and beach rocks bring the field into the classroom, giving students practice in doing what geoscientists do. These images are examples of geologic puzzles. -

Systems Geobiology Powers of 10part of Complex Systems:Teaching ActivitiesBruce Fouke, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Systems Geobiology is the study of complex interactions arising from the interplay of biological, geological, physical, chemical and even social systems across multiple spatial (microns to thousands of kilometers) ...

Tracers in the hydrologic cycle: A jigsaw activitypart of Complex Systems:Teaching ActivitiesPeter Lea, Bowdoin College Using a jigsaw approach, students investigate biogeochemical transformations (nitrate, silica, pH and conductivity) of water as it moves through the hydrologic cycle. The resulting conceptual framework facilitates ...

Review for interdisiplinary science course (stream ecology, watersheds)part of Complex Systems:Teaching ActivitiesCailin Huyck Orr, Washington State University- Pullman This is a large-scale participatory activity used to prompt students to review what they have learned and to think actively and cooperatively about the connections between the systems we have discussed prior to the ...

Mid-level spreadsheeting and complex modeling of real-world scarp evolutionpart of Quantitative Skills:Activity CollectionWilliam Locke, Montana State University-Bozeman This exercise is a second or familiarization exercise in spreadsheeting, but is also a mathematical model for slope evolution. It uses the concept of "erosivity" (generally, the relative ratio of driving and resisting forces) and slope angle to reshape an initial topography. Finally, it asks the students themselves to come up with a real-world situation worth modeling.

Plate Tectonics as Expressed in Geological Landforms and Eventspart of MARGINS Data in the Classroom:MARGINS Mini-LessonsJeff Ryan This activity seeks to have students analyze global data sets on earthquake and volcano distributions toward identifying major plate boundary types in different regions on the Earth. A secondary objective is to familiarize students with two publicly available resources for viewing and manipulating geologically-relevant geospatial data: Google Earth(TM) and GeoMapApp.

Introduction to Mineral Identificationpart of Geoscience in Two-year Colleges:ActivitiesSuki Smaglik, Central Wyoming College The exercise uses an inquiry-based approached to overcome the fear of tackling mineral identification. Few instructions are given and students discover for themselves how to approach identification.

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Provenance: NAGTReuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

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The On the Cutting Edge website and workshop program are supported by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT). Your membership is helping to ensure that this site can continue to serve geoscience educators.